Witness the work-from-home mother in the wild.
She parents! And makes a living! AT THE SAME TIME.
Alriiiiight, it happened. A troll made me mad. I know I said a few weeks ago that troll comments rarely get to me anymore - and really only do when they feel like they contain a little nugget of truth - but the other day someone asked who was watching my kids while I was in New York City shooting a pilot for a show, and I got all riled up.
Lots of things scare me. The possibility of not having enough work to pay the bills. The idea of my parents getting sick. Climate change. Spiders. Most of my fears are pretty general, though; they wake me up at night and start my heart pounding, but still, they don't inspire that immediate kind of terror that you see in movies (well, except for the spiders).
I'm ten thousand feet up in the air right now. My son is watching Thor in the row in front of me and my daughter is asleep on my lap, and my hands are shaking almost too badly to write this, because I don't know that I've ever been more scared in my life than I was just a few minutes ago.
I dream often of plane crashes. I'm pretty sure that they symbolize a fear of losing control, which means my subconscious really knows what it's doing. The dreams are always different, but one element stays the same: I'm looking out the window, and I feel a lift in my stomach, and then there's the sense of falling. Sometimes I crash in my dreams. Sometimes I board another plane, just trying to get home, and the next plane I'm on crashes, too.
I’ve marched a lot in the past year and a half - in the streets of Los Angeles, at the San Francisco airport, on the side of a road somewhere in the middle of nowhere, and so on and so forth, as we do nowadays - but this Saturday, during the March For Our Lives, I stayed home.
I packed for Monday morning's flight to New York. I played Mario Kart with my kids, and covered spring bulbs with just-thawed soil. Every hour or so I sifted through my social media feeds, watching all passive and warm on my big, comfortable couch while Emma Gonzalez stood silent to mark the six minutes and twenty seconds it took for a former classmate to murder 17 of his classmates with a semi-automatic rifle, while eleven-year-old Naomi Wadler reminded America that there are huge numbers of American women whose deaths by gun violence are mere statistics, and while Yolanda Renee King echoed the words of her grandfather: "I have a dream that enough is enough. That this should be a gun-free world. Period."
"Spread the word," she led the chant. "Have you heard? All across the nation. We...are going to be. A great generation."
Do not let this sweet face fool you; three-year-olds are masters of deception.
Ok, I'm going to need to ramble for a second because THREE YEAR OLDS, holy god.
Here is what just happened: I walked my daughter to preschool, as usual. As usual, she wanted to touch "the fluffy thing" (one of the fuzzy reeds that grows alongside the road in a particular spot along our route). So we did. And then we touched "the red thing" (an aloe flower). Then we went on our merry way, and just as we pulled up to school she burst into tears.
There are some places in the world that hold your memories as if they were people. A few of mine: the Wiccan shop that used to be in a basement storefront on West 81st Street, where a woman with long red hair and her HIV-positive best friend sold me candles and helped me figure out how to survive being a teenager. A terrible dive bar in the Valley called The Green Frog, where I learned to play darts and that I should never drink Jack Daniels. The entire town of Ogunquit, Maine, where I hunted for hermit crabs on the rocks at five, ate Strawberry Shortcake and lobster rolls on rickety wooden patios at fifteen, and then walked down a flower-lined aisle buzzing with mosquitoes (one of which was busy investigating my right eyelid) towards my husband at twenty-seven.
And the Cayman Islands; maybe there most of all.
It's the places where we vacation when we're kids that always get us through the heart, isn't it? I wish I had some wise thoughts that might explain why, but the best I can come up with is that our vacations let us be our purest selves at whatever age we're at, while still giving us permission to dip our toes into what came before and what's still to come. We get to hold on to our childhoods by playing in the sand just a little bit longer, and also get to have our first kisses just a little bit too soon. We get to play miniature golf with our parents, and hug them back when they hug us even though we think we're supposed to be too old for hugs - because really, who's watching?
